I would argue it's not so much the community (I'll bet there are maybe a dozen people who understand the source well enough to improve it) so much as the fact that TeX is feature complete, essentially bug free, and written by a genius. It really is an amazing piece of software which has no equal, even if you wanted to spend thousands of dollars. Why are we intent on replacing it again? I understand the gripes about the language, the error messages, and so forth. So design something that compiles down to TeX, not unlike what the Java(Script) people have done. Reinventing TeX just seems like an exercise in futility. (Nice duck logo though.)